Sea change: a Q&A with Kathi Vidal
You have always been a proponent of diversity and inclusion. What drove you to make that an area of focus?
In the early ’90s, I was part of a team that founded a women’s legal conference before women’s conferences had taken off as a concept. During our first event, I spoke about what was to become the America Invents Act. After I stepped down from the stage, one of the women in the audience shared with me that she had never heard me speak in such a lively and passionate way.
That was an “aha” moment for me. I realised that during engineering school and while working as an engineer for five years—both in very male-dominated environments—I had unconsciously adapted my behaviour. That moment made me realise the value of diversity and what it was truly like to feel included as my most authentic self. For me, it was not that others were asking me to be inauthentic, it was that I had adapted without knowing it.
Since that time, diversity and inclusion (D&I), as well as authenticity have been keen focuses of mine.
Saurabh Vishnubhakat, professor at Texas A&M University, suggested in his 2014 study, “Gender Diversity in the Patent Bar” that only 18% of patent practitioners were women. How do you plan to address this shortfall?
We have two key initiatives. First, we need to make sure we have a diverse pipeline. We are working with the National Inventors Hall of Fame on Camp Invention and other programming for grade-school children. We have trained over 250,000 children so far this year. And we are training teachers on how to teach innovation and IP to our teens and tweens. I’m confident that with early introduction and with reinforcement, we will broaden the universe of those interested in science, technology, Maths and engineering, and then IP. Even after a week of camp, the children were asking the kinds of questions I hear from entrepreneurs, such as: “how can I protect my merchandise on the internet?”, and “exactly how much money is it going to cost me to get a patent?”
The other key initiative is to reduce any unnecessary barriers. To ensure high-quality, inclusive representation for all US innovators, we plan to expand the admission criteria for our patent bar to encourage broader participation. We are considering whether a separate design patent practitioner bar would be beneficial to the public and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Not only could such a bar better align the bar requirements with the subject matter, it would open up participation.
